Research on high‐level nuclear waste management has focused on technical and scientific issues since the U.S. National Academy of Sciences first studied the problem in the mid‐1950s and recommended long‐term disposal in deep salt formations. In this review, we trace the development of the problem's definition and its associated research since socioeconomic, political, and policy issues were first given consideration and nuclear waste management became recognized as more than a technical problem. Three somewhat overlapping time periods can be identified. First, from the mid‐1970s to the early 1980s, initial research explored institutional dimensions of nuclear waste, among other subjects, while several countries attempted to officially solve the problem. The second period began in the early 1980s with a concerted effort to site nuclear waste repositories, and ended in the mid‐1990s with some progress in Sweden, Finland, and the United States, and general stalemate elsewhere. This period accelerated research on risk perception and stigma of nuclear waste, and elevated a focus on public trust. Special attention was given to repository siting conflicts in particular. The last period, since the mid‐1990s, has been characterized by failure and continuing political stalemate, with the major exception of Scandinavia, and increased attention to public participation, political systems, and international solutions. Questions of ethics have been given serious attention, while research on risk perceptions and siting conflicts continues. Thus, we see some signs of progress toward final disposal. We frame these periods in a broader context of the shifting role of applied social scientists. The paper concludes with a general discussion of this research area and prospects for future research.

The present study investigates how laughter features in the everyday lives of 3–5-year old children in Swedish preschools. It examines and discusses typical laughter patterns and their functions with a particular focus on children's and intergenerational (child-adult/educator) laughter in early education context. The research questions concern: who laughs with whom; how do adults respond to children's laughter, and what characterizes the social situations in which laughter is used and reciprocated. Theoretically, the study answers the call for sociocultural approaches that contextualize children's everyday social interaction, e.g., in different institutions or homes, to study the diverse conditions society forms for learning, sociality, and socialization and development of shared norms. Methodologically, the study makes use of mixed methods: it uses descriptive statistics that identify prevalent patterns in laughter practices and, on the basis of these results, examines social-interactional situations of children's laughter in detail. It was found that children's laughter tended to be directed to children and adults' laughter tended to be directed to adults. Eighty seven percent of children's laughter was directed to other children, and adults directed their laughter to other adults 2.7 times as often as to children. The qualitative interaction analysis shows that children and adults exhibited different patterns of laughter. Children primarily sought and received affiliation through laughter in the peer group, and the adults were often focused on the institutional and educational goals of the preschool. Overall, the study shows that intergenerational reciprocal laughter was a rare occurrence and suggests that laughter between generations is interesting in that it can be seen as indicative of how children and adults handle alterity in their everyday life. By deploying multiple methods, the present study points to the importance of viewing emotion and norm sharedness in social interaction not just as a matter of communicating an emotion from one person to another, but as an intricate process of inviting the others into or negotiating the common emotional and experiential ground.

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Swedish children’s use of the headshake from 18 to 30 months shows a developmental progression from rote-learned and formulaic coordination with speech to increasingly more flexible and productive coordination with speech. To deal with these observations, I make use of the concept ofmultimodal constructions, to extend usage-based approaches to language learning and construction grammar by inclusion of the kinetic domain. These ideas have consequences for the (meta‑)theoretical question of whether gesture can be said to be part of language or not. I suggest thatsomespeech-coordinated gestures, including the headshake, can be considered part of language, also in the traditional sense of language as a conventionalized system.